Damian Thompson is Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He was once described by The Church Times as a "blood-crazed ferret". He is on Twitter as HolySmoke. His latest book is The Fix: How addiction is taking over your world. He also writes about classical music for The Spectator.

Cameron, Osborne and friends: adolescent snobbery at the heart of government

Do you remember the Labour activists dressed in top hats and tails who followed around the Conservative candidate in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election in 2008? The “Tory Toffs” stunt flopped and Hazel Blears sounded like an idiot when she defended it after Labour lost the seat. “We are all products of our backgrounds, whether we’re from Eton or Salford,” she said.

Four years on, though, and Labour’s mockery looks surprisingly prescient. As this paper reported yesterday, more than a third of people who voted for David Cameron in 2010 say they won’t do so again. Ask them why, and they’ll talk about policy U-turns and lack of leadership. I think there’s more to it than that. Former Tory voters see the Prime Minister and Chancellor on television and mentally dress them in penguin suits.

Former Tories, note: not just Labour and Lib Dem voters. But, actually, it’s worse than that. Plenty of current Tory activists think of Dave and George as cold-hearted toffs. So do dozens of Conservative MPs. That didn’t matter when the party trusted the PM’s political instincts. Now that the trust has evaporated, it matters very much indeed.

I’ve written before about David Cameron’s rudeness. He turns his good manners up and down like a dimmer switch, depending on how useful you can be to him. It’s a technique associated with a certain breed of old Etonian – and wannabe Etonians, too, such as George Osborne. The Chancellor is even more haughty than his boss: he seems to be on a mission to alienate potential Tory donors by staring through them.

I’m not saying that ex-public schoolboys are ruder than any other section of society – just that certain young toffs employ unusually sadistic techniques of freezing people out. These techniques have been refined over centuries of competitive snobbery; they’re deployed with glee by members of the Bullingdon Club and other Oxford dining societies.

These are just children’s games, of course. Under normal circumstances, the only people who care about them are chippy Left-wingers or social climbers who’ve been silently “dropped” by the posh boys. (The silence, the lack of explanation, is part of the game.)

But these aren’t normal circumstances. Perhaps the oddest thing about this Government – even odder than the cohabitation with the Lib Dems – is the way the adolescent cruelty of the Oxford smart set has been turned into an instrument of statecraft.

We caught a hint of it this week, when the Chancellor’s “friends” started briefing against the Transport Secretary, Justine Greening, for opposing a third runway at Heathrow. Not long ago, Greening probably thought she was close to, if not part of, the inner circle. Then the whispers started – just as they do whenever the Bullingdon tires of one of its hangers-on.

“The fact is that David and George don’t like people very much,” says a politician who has known both men for years. That’s a bit sweeping: it’s probably fairer to say that the membership list for their club of friends was closed years ago. (Until recently, billionaires and media barons were let in as associates, but that didn’t work out.)

This is the modus operandi of amateur statesmen, not the professionals Britain deserves in a time of crisis. Cameron and Osborne’s snootiness stifles their intellectual curiosity and is poisoning their relationship with a Tory party that, even if it adored them, would have difficulty making sense of their policies. I suppose Dave could turn up the dimmer switch of his good manners so they reach the back benches, but my hunch is that he’s left it too late.

A papal crusade against sweatpants

Archbishop Róbert Bezák of Trnava, an ultra-liberal Catholic prelate from Slovakia, has been dismissed from his post by the Pope for a number of offences, including lounging around in jeans or sweatpants. Quite right, too. I can’t imagine even the most well-upholstered English bishop – Mgr Arthur Roche, say – relieving the pressure on his waistband by adopting sweatpants. But fairness compels me to point out that, if you search the internet, you will find a photograph of an elderly Bavarian gentleman on holiday, standing by a piano wearing a suit and tie. There’s no date, however, so I can’t tell whether it was before or after he was elected Pope.

New friends for North Korea

North Korea shouldn’t be pigeonholed as “a dangerous maverick state ruled by a capricious dictator”, wrote Paul Watson on the Guardian’s Comment is Free (CiF) website on Thursday. Really? What about the 200,000 slaves in labour camps?

Also on CiF, Charlie Skelton revealed the “well-known US neoconservatives” behind the Syrian opposition. The Assad regime loved Skelton’s article so much that, to quote one Twitter critic, it “turned it into propaganda on Syria TV”. But now things get confusing, because the critic in question was Brian Whitaker, an editor of CiF disgusted by the site’s drift to the extreme Left. And all this in a week when the Guardian reported losses of £44 million, prompting speculation that, in addition to sticking up for North Korea, it had adopted the country’s business model.

Echoes of Lady Chatterley

Baroness (Onora) O’Neill of Bengrave, former Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, is a lady of refined sensibilities. In a statement to the Leveson Inquiry this week, she suggested that newspaper readers find it “sometimes impossible to assess what they read”. They may be “misled, and unsure how to assess the truth or falsity, the importance or triviality, of media claims”.

Her solution? A “regulator of media process” to weed out “pseudo public interest journalism”. Such a regulator would have a statutory basis and exercise power over media organisations “that have a turnover above some threshold”.

Her ladyship concedes that this would “leave issues of enforceability unresolved”. I’ll say. Her scheme is so dotty, sinister and patronising that it defies analysis. Listen carefully, however, and you can catch the echo of Mervyn Griffith-Jones, QC, addressing jurors at the Lady Chatterley trial: “Is this a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?”

All roads lead to Tucson, Arizona

There’s been a fuss this week over whether Christian free schools will be allowed to teach Creationist biology in RE lessons. A colleague asked me: if a cult believed the Romans didn’t build the Colosseum, would it be OK for them to teach schoolchildren their theory as doctrine? And that reminded me: incredibly, there are people who believe that the Romans built a colony in Tucson, Arizona. The book outlining this nonsense is called Calalus, by Cyclone Covey (1975). There’s also an even stranger book arguing that ancient Hebrews founded mighty American civilisations that were later visited by Jesus. Its name escapes me, but I believe Mitt Romney has a copy…